Digital delivery has emerged as an efficient and profitable method of distributing digital goods such as software. While some suppliers of digital goods offer simple downloads from their web sites, these services provide only limited value to the supplier and the supplier's customers. There is a growing demand from end-users for increased services and from suppliers for better management and control of the complete delivery process. Increasingly, digital goods involve frequent updates, bug fixes, patches, and release notifications, resulting in exceedingly complex product relationships.
Prior attempts to provide efficient mechanisms for software delivery involved exclusive submission of orders by software manufacturers and electronic delivery of software to direct customers of the manufacturers, as well as to customers of the manufacturers' respective channel partners, such as, for example, their resellers and distributors. The added order processing overhead imposed on the software manufacturers resulted in the manufacturers gaining access to each channel partner's customer base.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a system and method for enabling both direct customers of software manufacturers and customers of channel partners to receive electronic delivery of digital assets and licenses from a single electronic software delivery site. There is also a need to provide a system and method for enabling software manufacturers to uniquely define the use of the electronic software and license delivery service for each of their associated channel partners, such as, for example, to define whether the channel partner can submit orders directly to the system and to define limits on such orders, to specify which products from the manufacturer's catalog is a channel partner allowed to deliver, and to define which reporting information the manufacturer may access for data submitted by each channel partner. There is a further need for a system and method for providing predetermined access to the reporting information for the software manufacturer and their associated channel partners, as described in further detail below.